"Boredom is the desire for happiness left in its pure state."-Giacomo Leopardi"Something that would reduce or enhance the feeling of boredom." - "We're not bored." "We're not capable of it."-Maurice Blanchot

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

notes

What happens in meditations that last ten, fifteen hours is that you run through your top ten erotic fantasies, ambition fantasies, revenge fantasies, global ratification fantasies. You run through them all until you bore yourself to death, basically, and the faculty that produces opinions and snap judgments and unrealistic scenarios for your own prominence, after you run through them for a number of years, they cease to have charge. They bore themselves into non-existence. You see them as diversions from another kind of intimacy that you become more interested in—and that is what Socrates said: Know Thyself...

• From The New Yorker: Nabokov's short story, Natasha published for the first time in English. Apparently written around 1924 when Nabokov was in his mid-20s, discovered in the writers' archives at the Library of Congress and translated by his son Dmitri. Builds the story "of a young woman who cares for her ailing father in Berlin while he mourns their exile from Russia." Interesting anecdote-wise that Nabokov's own family fled Russia about five years before he wrote it, and two years earlier his own father was assassinated in Berlin.